Up to late November 1861, Abraham Lincoln carefully avoided any policy in regard to slavery that would bring freedom to the slaves, in whole or in part. Even his support of Gen. Benjamin Butler’s contraband-of-war policy and the Confiscation Act that effectively made it law, although practically speaking a tremendous blow against slavery, did not formally challenge its legality. While the act confiscated the slaves of disloyal owners it did not free them. Instead, “contrabands,” as they were known, became what amounted to wards of the federal government–no longer slaves, but not truly free yet either.

Therefore, it was highly significant when on November 26, 1861, Lincoln drafted a bill for the Delaware legislature that would have provided for the gradual compensated emancipation of the state’s slaves. This action represents Lincoln’s first affirmative step as President toward promoting formal freedom for the slaves. Admittedly, it was highly limited. Delaware had less than 2,000 slaves on the eve of the Civil War, and of the loyal border states it by far was the closest to having slavery die out on its own. Lincoln reasoned it would be the easiest state to enact gradual compensated emancipation and that with success there, he could persuade the other loyal border states to follow suit. As he wrote George Fisher, Delaware’s lone U.S. Representative, “If I can get this plan started in Delaware I have no fear but that all the other border states will accept it.”

The bill, if it had been enacted, would have had the U.S. government compensate Delaware, essentially trading federal bonds in installments for the gradual emancipation of the state’s slaves over a five-year period. The original version of the draft bill provided for annual federal bond payments with slavery ending for good in 1867. The second version, which Lincoln evidently thought more workable, lengthened the process to thirty annual installments with slavery definitively ending in 1893 (although the process could be shortened if Delaware’s legislature preferred). The revised version freed all slaves when the reached 35 years old until 1893, when all remaining slaves became free. Both versions provided for apprenticing slaves younger than twenty-one for males and younger than eighteen for females, a move designed to allow slaveholders to keep minors even when their parents became free. To view the text of Lincoln’s draft bills for Delaware emancipation, please <click here>.

As Allen Guelzo describes in Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (2004), how Lincoln’s bill failed to become law. Guelzo writes:

Clearly, despite a large free black population and few slaves, even whites in Delaware feared a final end to the peculiar institution, with its seeming spectre of disruption and violence. For the same reason, Abraham Lincoln would find resistance to gradual compensated emancipation even more fervent in the other loyal border states. Yet it is significant that Lincoln kept trying to push this gradual compensated emancipation in the loyal border states in the first half of 1862. He no doubt was aware from his vantage point as commander-in-chief of the subversive influence Union forces were having on slavery, even when commanders clearly wanted to protect the property rights of loyal slaveholders. Slaves and ordinary Union soldiers clearly had more power to undermine slavery in the border states than Union leaders had the ability to enforce it. With slavery in trouble even where it was less subject to the Confiscation Act, it was clearly under threat. Better, Lincoln must have thought, to encourage the loyal border states to adopt an orderly end to slavery, with the ex-slaves leaving the country, than risk the evils he and many other whites were convinced would come from a sudden, uncontrolled emancipation. It would take a further six months of mounting casualties, Union setbacks, and softening support for the war to get President Lincoln to adopt a more radical approach that would be embodied in the Emancipation Proclamation. But by late 1861, it was clear through his actions, Abraham Lincoln no longer believed the free soil approach to emancipation–hemming slavery in where it already existed and waiting for it to die on its own–was the correct policy of the federal government to the peculiar institution.

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About Donald R. Shaffer

Donald R. Shaffer is the author of _After the Glory: The Struggles of Black Civil War Veterans_ (Kansas, 2004), which won the Peter Seaborg Award for Civil War Scholarship in 2005. More recently he published (with Elizabeth Regosin), _Voices of Emancipation: Understanding Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction through the U.S. Pension Bureau Files_ (2008). Dr. Shaffer teaches online exclusively (i.e., a virtual professor). He lives in Arizona and can be contacted at donald_shaffer@yahoo.com